


Gift Guides for Grumpy Bastards

by intrikate88



Category: Tomorrowland (2015)
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 16:41:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5463680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set a while after the movie. </p><p>When Casey tries to figure out a present for the birthday Frank doesn't want to celebrate, she finds the one person who knows everything there is to know on Frank Walker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gift Guides for Grumpy Bastards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WickedWonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WickedWonder/gifts).



 “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me it’s your birthday next week,” Casey said to Frank on Thursday as they checked the new batch of pins that were going to be going out with the second round of recruiters, scanning each of them to ensure that they were programmed for the right message. 

“How did you find that out?” demanded Frank. 

“In Nix’s old office, when I was going through files. There were records of classes and who was in them. I’m also, like, madly jealous you were in mechanical engineering with Bill Nye the Science Guy."

Frank muttered, “That kid was always clowning around for attention. Made up all these songs that everyone thought were hilarious. He wasn’t _that_ funny." 

Casey raised an eyebrow. “Jealous much?"

The look Frank shot her was scathing, so she chose to return  to the original topic, although she fully intended to chant _Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!_  at him sometime when he was least expecting it. At least _one_  of those monitors back at his farmhouse had to have had PBS whenever that show had actually been on television. (Casey had not watched _Bill Nye the Science Guy_ on PBS. Her dad had bought the DVDs after Casey’s babysitter complained that the only stimulating thing on a TV without cable was _Between the Lions_ , and Casey had been acting bored and irritable when she thought the books on the show were too easy, and the babysitter made some suggestions and implied that  _Boohbah_ might actually be some kind of horrific mind control.) 

“The class records had names, grades, birth dates, scores from whatever test thing it was that I did better than you and apparently everyone on, stuff like that. I didn’t go looking for it, I just saw it. So, what do you want to do for your birthday— cake? Party? Enough candles to burn something down?"

 “We’re not doing anything,” Frank said. “You can just forget you saw anything, forget my birthday. I haven’t noticed my birthday for years and I’m not starting now.” 

“Okay, no candles, but how do you feel about a party with an open bar?"

 “I feel like I’ve got an open bar at home, no guests needed. Or wanted. Will you get back to work already?"

Casey held up her hands. “Fine! Fine. No party, no cake, no fun.” She scanned another pin, and checked her tablet to verify that the right message would be brightly hallucinated by its recipient, then placed the pin into a case to hibernate until the right person was identified. 

Frank pointed his scanner at her. “You promise?"

“I promise I will not force you to enjoy yourself in any way,” Casey said. 

He looked at her suspiciously, but only said, “That’s right, you won’t,” and turned back to checking his tablet. Casey closed a case and moved to the next palette of pins. 

That night after supper, as she worked on a project for her own mechanical engineering class, the conversation came back to her. It really was sad and kind of pathetic, she thought, how many years Frank must have spent in the farmhouse, ignoring his birthdays and probably drinking too much, all because the wonderful world of Tomorrowland had kicked him out without so much as an identity or college degree. Anyone would be bitter about that; when you lost something that big, it was hard not to be. But he was back, and they were building a new Tomorrowland that wouldn’t be broadcasting an endless stream of doom into the world. Things could be better, and not just in terms of the whole world. They could all choose more good things for themselves. Frank could try enjoying his life a little, for the first time in years.

Well, his thoughts on birthdays be damned, she didn’t care if he wasn’t feeling like having a birthday. The singing and getting cornered at parties she could understand, if that’s what he didn’t want out of a birthday then she could respect that. But he didn’t have to be getting another year older; they could have all died almost a year ago, and then he wouldn’t be getting any older at all. So she was going to give him a goddamn present, whether he liked it or not. 

The only question was: what do you get the grumpy old bastard who already has everything he needs, since he invented most of it?

On Friday, she had no classes, and generally spent the day in the central record hall reviewing past and current projects and personnel. The city had mainly fallen to being maintained by robots, and the population had dwindled after the failure to open Tomorrowland to Earth’s public in 1984, but a certain amount of work was still ongoing, and with her and Frank as the de facto leadership after the end of Nix’s stranglehold on the place, they needed to know what resources they had. It had been close to a year, and she felt like they were barely beginning to make headway. 

(She also really hoped they could get Tomorrowland working again, because otherwise, all of her classwork, wonderful as it was, was not going to result in an accredited college degree and none of this would get her a job back in the non-nuked world and she could just retreat to a survivalist farmhouse in upstate New York like some people, except that farmhouse had been blown up, so really she’d be screwed. It wasn’t completely hard to avoid thinking like that in Tomorrowland, and she wasn’t the type of person who indulged in those eventualities anyway, but she would be blind not to see the consequences of this grand venture not working out.)

Bored with reading summaries about yet _another_  tachyonic engineering project’s results, Casey swiveled around in her chair until she got dizzy and stared up at the ceiling. “Hey, computer?” she said out loud. 

“Yes, Casey?” the bland, soothing female voice of the computer responded. 

“Can you show me some records on Frank Walker?” she asked. Maybe if she found something interesting, it would give her an idea of what to give him for his birthday. She knew she could just pay her dad to buy a bottle of scotch, but that wasn’t a personal gift. Well, it _was_ , but it was probably the kind of personal gift anyone could get him. Not her. 

“You do not have sufficient access for the records of Walker, John Francis, nickname Frank,” said the computer. 

Casey groaned, extensively, then spun around again in her chair. A thought occurred to her, and she put out a foot to stop her momentum. “What about Athena? Uh, Audio-Animatronic unit Athena?” 

“One moment, Casey,” said the computer, and Casey sat up. Frank had probably blocked her from accessing his files, which wasn’t really that unreasonable of him. He deserved his privacy, even if she’d never applied that standard to her own behavior before and didn’t intend to start now. But he hadn’t blocked Athena, which was weird. Athena knew Frank better than he knew himself. And Athena had a literally photographic memory. The computer spoke up again. “Accessing backup memory drive of Athena. Last wireless backup at twenty-one hundred hours. Date—" 

When the computer recited the date, Casey put a hand over her mouth. Of course she knew that date. It was when she had first arrived in Tomorrowland. It was when Nix had tried to exile them to a dying earth and Athena had been shot. She didn’t know exactly when the tower had been blown up by Athena’s self-destruct mechanism. It had been sometime after it got dark.

The memory hit her hard, suddenly, of feeling so horribly awkward as Frank leaned over the body of this girl who had come to mean so much to Casey in just a few days. Casey had felt like such an intruder as Athena’s logs played for Frank, and then she used her last words to tell the two of them to stick together. Athena should have had so much more time, and Frank should have had so much more time to understand. It wasn’t fair. Casey felt a tear roll down her cheek, and she scrubbed at her face with her sleeve.

It just wasn’t fair. 

“Yeah, uh, access—“ she started, then cleared her throat. “Access last memory drive backup for Athena. Um.” Casey searched her mind for some applicable command. “Restore backup."

“Limited access to retrievable video logs and related commands available at this console. Full restore to drive only available through a networked AA interface."

“Wait, so I can only get all of her records if I get one of the blank AAs out of that creepy storage hall?” It honestly looked like a closet full of dead body mannequins. Casey avoided the place if she could. Other technicians could program the robot recruiters going out into the world. 

“Full restore to drive only available through a networked AA interface,” the computer repeated.

Casey considered this. A full restore would be— well, it would be a lot. She didn’t know how old Athena was or where she came from, but there were at _least_ fifty years of recorded data, with video and run logs and whatever analytical applications she was constantly using and honestly, Casey couldn’t even imagine the extent of data that could be stored in that much time. It wasn’t like copying a terabyte of movies, music, and research papers from a computer to an external hard drive, this was… yottabytes, probably. Maybe an amount of information there wasn’t a name for on earth yet. 

“Okay, no full restore, not yet,” she said out loud. “Bring up… file directory of recorded videos?” She tried.

On the terminal in front of her, a long list of folders appeared, each of them named with a string of numbers and letters that may have corresponded to dates and times in some separate index, but meant nothing to Casey just on sight. She scrolled down through the list, and selected one folder at random. She saw a few files that, from her experience in the record room, she could identify as text documents. The others she didn’t recognize, despite going through some multimedia files from recent years’ projects. She selected a file and waited to see if it would open. 

Casey’s fingers stilled on the keyboard as a new image appeared on the screen. Nothing happened for a second, just some other program than the one she was looking through started up, and then sound came through her speakers: a giant crash, it sounded like. She jumped. A video started playing on the screen; she saw a boy with round cheeks and brown hair and very wide eyes. “Frank-“ said a voice— Athena’s voice, Casey recognized, and then a hand came into view, reaching out. The boy grabbed the hand. “Athena, run!” he shouted, turning and pulling her, and the video- the camera- bounced joltingly forward. Casey got momentarily dizzy as the camera tilted at a hard right spin, and then smoothed out as it kept moving forward through walkways Casey recognized as the elevated sidewalks of Tomorrowland, in nighttime dimness. She hit the spacebar, and the video paused, frozen on a blurred frame of Frank, reaching for what looked like a jetpack. 

She sat back in her chair. She’d played too many first-person shooter video games with her brother to not recognize the first-person camera perspective, which had to mean she was seeing Frank out of Athena’s eyes. She’d seen him like this only once before, only for a moment before Frank’s house had been invaded and blown up, so her memory of the actual three-dimensional hologram video he’d made was a little obscured. This video wasn’t nearly as good— the resolution was good for a time when digital video recording shouldn’t even have existed, but otherwise not great, and possibly compressed weirdly.  

There was a softly flashing red light at the edge of the video program’s window. She clicked on it, and another video window popped up, this one with a rendering of Athena’s face that was heading straight for uncanny-valley territory. Casey pushed the spacebar again, and this time, in sync, Frank slung the jetpack on, pushing his arms through the straps, and pulled Athena close. Casey saw Athena’s eyebrows go up and her mouth form an ‘oh!’ just as they launched into the air. Athena wrapped her arms around Frank’s ribs and looked down, where a plume of dust was exploding under them and the contrails the jetpack left in the air. Along with the computer generated image window was another window running what looked like text commands that seemed to use a fairly intuitive logic for Athena’s perception and reaction capabilities.

“I don’t know how you expect to explain this one!” Athena shouted, the wind whipping her hair around. 

“I’ll figure something out by morning!” Frank shouted back, and banked around an elevated tram track. “Unless you’ve got any ideas?"

_Programming does not allow for new ideas. Frank is not aware that I operate on AA programming. Therefore: I must not provide him with the option of my ideas,_ scrolled the text across the bottom window Casey looked at.

“Oh, no, Frank,” Athena said, "you had all the bright ideas to get us into this, you’re going to come up with whatever idea gets us out of it!"

Casey paused the video again. The rendering of Athena’s face must be coming from the movement controls on her body, and for all that it was a computer-generated image of a girl’s face, it was growing on Casey, and she could fairly easily piece together a version of the video in her mind that wasn’t solely seen through Athena’s eyes. It was still a hell of a lot less creepy than any of the robots that had come after her in Houston, or at Frank’s old farmhouse.

She closed the videos, then went back to look at the folders again. “Organize folders by date and show date recorded,” Casey told the computer. The folders rearranged themselves, and each title took on a subtitle. She selected another folder, which was subtitled 24 November 1964, and then leaned her chin on her hand to watch as she played another video. 

~~~~~ 

It was difficult, in the city, to find somewhere to look at the stars. “I don’t see why we couldn’t go to the observatory,” Athena said.

“Because it’s a clear night and actual astrophysicists already reserved the telescope. Besides, isn’t this more fun?"

“I suppose I will find out,” Athena answered him doubtfully. 

“Of course it’s more fun,” Frank told her with conviction. They were on a rooftop of one of the apartment buildings farther out of town, beyond the hydroelectric generator and the light cast by the towers that glowed day and night. Frank had brought a telescope, and Athena carried the tripod. They made it across most of town by tram, but in the end, it had been necessary to get up to a roof, arms full of equipment, by jetpack. There was no hesitation in how Athena wrapped her arms around Frank, the equipment between them, while he controlled the jetpack with both hands. 

It wasn’t a large telescope that they had brought with them, but still bigger than the toy one Frank had told Athena he had at home: he said he had run errands for people in town and sent away for it by mail order, all without his dad’s help. His dad hadn’t understood why he wanted a telescope, Frank had said, but he had shown the first signs of respect that Frank had worked for it all on his own. It wasn’t exactly the approval he wanted, but it had been enough. 

When the telescope was set up, Frank peered through the eyepiece and adjusted the focus, then straightened up and grinned. Excitement showed in his eyes, and he reached out to grab Athena’s hand and pull her forward. “Look!"

“What am I looking at?” she asked.

“Just look at it!” Frank said, his excitement momentarily dimming in annoyance at her impatience. Athena leaned over and put her left eye to the eyepiece, adjusting her vision to the new focus. Her vision filled with the bright and shining moon, and a crater on it, the jagged edges of it clearly visible. The walls of the crater didn’t slope smoothly but instead were layered, like terraces. At the center of it, there seemed to be a small mountain, casting a sharp shadow contrasting with the reflected light. She straightened up again. 

“Isn’t it beautiful?” said Frank. “It’s Tycho, one of the moon’s craters. It’s still the same in this dimension as it is at home! I’ve never seen it so clearly before.” He grinned. “Isn’t it great?” 

Athena looked at him as he practically vibrated with happiness, just because he got to show her a crater in the moon. This was his first chance to use a real telescope, and he had spent only a few seconds looking through it, because he wanted to show her what he saw. She had chosen him because he was a dreamer, because he fit the parameters of her search protocols and there was something about him that made her want to watch him and see what he did. None of the prediction scenarios she had considered had included him trying to share his dreams with her. His eyes were wide, and he was grinning, and couldn’t stand still, and it should all mean that she was right in choosing him as a recruit, but there was something unquantifiable about his reaction. Part of her was processing and processing and trying to quantify whatever it was about Frank that she seemed frustratingly unable to observe with her capacities. 

Most of her was automatically mirroring him, grinning back and bouncing on her toes. She had not specifically initiated this reaction, but she was doing it anyway, because she— because it was wonderful. Seeing the details of a crater on the moon in the sky, when her optical focus was limited to only seeing that color differences existed on the moon, that was something wonderful. And so she grinned back at Frank. “Show me something else!” she said. 

“Okay, we’ll look at the stars next… I wasn’t sure if the constellations would be different here, since we’re someplace else, but since Tycho is still in the same place, maybe the stars are too…” He bent over the telescope again, swinging it away from the moon and into a black part of the sky.  

Athena looked up into the night while he did so. Her optical sensors were not obsolete; they were regularly upgraded. But the sky was nothing but black to her, and always had been. She had seen pictures taken with large telescopes, their lenses too large to fit into her head, and there were pinpoints of light across the dark expanse, sprayed like water droplets. She was certain that one day she would have the number of light sensors that human eyes did. “I’ve always lived in this city. I’ve never been far enough away from light pollution where the stars could be seen with the naked eye,” Athena said, telling the truth by circumnavigating that other truth he didn’t know yet, and she still didn’t want to tell him. 

He looked up with shock on his face. “You’ve never seen stars before?"

“Not with my own eyes," she said, still not lying. 

“Just a second—!” Frank said, almost hitting his face with the eyepiece with how fast he went back to it, turning it to focus on way and then the other, when in his haste he went too far. “Okay, look at this!” He backed out of the way, and she put her eye to the telescope. The night sky was dark, but suddenly, lights sprang out of the darkness, shining at her. They weren’t all the same, either; some were more yellow, some more white or blue, and they were large and so tiny she almost couldn’t see them. As she adjusted to seeing them she realized they were pulsing softly in brightness; no photographs she had seen had shown her that. She understood that it was aesthetically pleasing, but aesthetic appeal was not enough to explain how she felt the same way that she had the first time she had been allowed to leave Tomorrowland and go somewhere that had never been shown to her before. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Frank. I can _see stars_."

She turned her head to look at him. He looked younger than his twelve years in that moment, like a child who could barely hold still. “You like them?” he asked, his hands fidgeting with his shirt, then pushing his hands into his pockets, then pulling them out again.

“Of course! They’re…” No words occurred to Athena for a moment. They were stars. They had magnitude and brightness and were aesthetically pleasing and no quantifying words could describe how they made her processors race without any significant data input or why she wanted Frank to keep showing her things that he liked, because he liked things she hadn’t seen before and she wanted him to repeat the look he had on his face. His face brought her satisfaction. “I’ve never seen anything so wonderful."

“Look at it again,” he urged her, and she turned her head back to look. Seeing the stars again didn’t dull their magnificence. “See those bright stars, that you could kinda draw a W between?” he asked.

She examined the field of stars, dismissing the dimmer ones, and visualized lines between the ones that remained. A second later, she had identified the pattern he specified. “Yes, I see it."

“That constellation is called Cassiopeia. It’s named after a story the Greeks had about a really pretty lady.” He stopped talking suddenly. “Here, I’ll move it and show you another constellation!” 

Athena stepped back and let him move the telescope again, looking back up into the sky, still black to her own eyes. It held such secrets that she couldn’t see and Frank could, and she had never speculated, when she had recruited him, that he would let her share what he was able to see.

Several constellations later, they sat next to each other near the edge of the roof and looked back at the city. Frank had pulled a thermos of cocoa from the telescope case and offered it to her. “No, thank you,” she said.

“It’s cold out, it’ll warm you up,” he said. 

“I’m not cold,” she told him.

“You’re never cold,” he observed.

“No,” she said simply. She had temperature sensors, and she knew that it was seven degrees Celsius that night. The temperature did not cause her positive or negative sensations. Beside her, Frank set down the cocoa, and smiled at her crookedly. 

Then he reached over and started tickling her. 

Athena didn’t move. “What is that?” Frank was wiggling his fingers along her torso and laughing. She leaned closer. “What are you doing?"

The smile dropped off his face and he pulled his hands away like she had burned him. “I’m sorry, I— I shouldn’t have—"

She was startled how quickly his mood changed. “No, I don’t understand what that was,” she tried to explain. 

Frank got up, reaching for the cocoa and screwing the lid back on the thermos with a ferocity. “I was just, uh.” He looked away from her, up at the black sky. “I was just trying to make you laugh."

She stared at him curiously. “Why would digging your fingers into my ribs make me laugh?"

“I just— I was tickling you, I thought— I mean, I don’t know. It was just tickling."

Athena considered this. “But why did you do it?"

“I’m sorry! Okay?” When he looked back at her, his face was flushed and he seemed to be holding his breath. Why tickling should evoke such a response in him, she didn’t know. They had held hands before. When he needed extra stability when he was working, she often held whatever he was working on, their arms touching. She held on to him when he carried her with his jetpack. Contact between them was frequent and had never resulted in him seeming— angry? Was this anger? (It was different than when Governor Nix was angry with her, it didn’t seem to be directed at her or even outwards at all.) It had never seemed to result in anything at all. She wanted to ask Frank more questions, but he was walking away from her to pack the cocoa back in the telescope case. It seemed they were leaving, and he wasn’t going to answer any more questions. 

“Okay,” she answered him meekly. 

He whirled around to look back at her. “You’re so weird sometimes, Athena,” he told her, and then turned back around to pick up his jetpack and start strapping it on. Athena got up quickly, brushing off her pants, and grabbed the folded-up tripod and telescope case. They felt like they weighed nothing at all. But something in her chest seemed to have become heavy and almost immobile, because Frank wasn’t looking at her like he knew the stars were beautiful, and she tried to grasp why, and it eluded her. 

As she held onto him as they flew back to the ground, the equipment tucked between them, she rested her face against his shoulder. Frank was strange, and he thought she was too. She thought that brought them together, but right now, it felt like nothing but space between them. 

~~~~~ 

Casey sighed. Of course it didn’t help anything, having the benefit of a hell of a lot of hindsight. Frank had clearly not known yet that Athena wasn’t what she appeared, and all those unquantifiable things that Athena had processed were what any smitten little boy would do, because contrary to what Athena may have thought of Frank, he  _was a_  dumb little kid. He went stargazing with the girl he liked and things got quiet and he got silly and then he thought she was rejecting him. 

It didn’t seem like that long ago that Casey had been walking through a parking lot with Frank and Athena, as Athena said, “He thinks I hurt him,” with so much matter-of-factness in her voice that she couldn’t have fully comprehended why this boy who showed her the stars for the first time would be holding on to such a sting of bitterness for so many years. Casey had gotten it at the time what there had been between them, or at least she had grasped that they had been children together, and then, like a jagged cut of a knife separating them, they were not. She had gotten it, but now she was starting to understand it. 

But Frank’s face— he had been so in love with the stars that he couldn’t help that love overflowing to sweep up Athena as well. 

She’d thought at the beginning of the video that maybe she could get a telescope for Frank’s apartment. His apartment was as far from his old farmhouse as she could imagine; where that had been crammed with old furniture and it appeared he might have hung on to anything that could ever possibly be useful one day, with all of his inventions laying around on top of everything, his apartment was sparse and uncluttered. He kept all his projects in his workshop and didn’t save anything he didn’t need. The only decorations were a couple of family pictures and the holographic slide he’d saved when his house was destroyed. He spent as little time in the place as he could. 

Maybe a telescope wasn’t the best idea to spruce up the space, though. And besides, like Athena had observed, in the city it was too bright to see the stars, anyway. Casey scrolled down the list of folders again, and selected 16 May 1965. 

~~~~~

Athena walked quickly down the crowded hall, resisting the urge to bodily move people crossing her path out of her way. Her programming only allowed her to do that in the most extreme of circumstances, but she could present three different arguments at least as to why this could be considered an extreme circumstance. “Frank!” she called out, when the crowd parted enough to let her see that he was still about thirty feet ahead of her. He didn’t turn his head. “Frank!"

He increased his walking speed by half a meter per second, which suggested he had heard her after all. She increased her walking speed by a meter per second, to close the distance. He was pushing his way out the door to get outside by the time she caught up to him. “Frank!” she called, when she was right behind him. 

“What?” he said, turning around. “What is it?"

“We have to talk!” said Athena. 

“What do you want to talk about?”

She didn’t answer instantly, and after a second, Frank turned to walk away again. She put a hand on his shoulder. “No, I meant that we have to have the established communication to talk to each other whenever we have to. I have to be able to talk to you. I recruited you. I am responsible for you.” 

“Oh, because you’re  _responsible for_  me. Great. Nobody ever cared enough to get me a robot babysitter before." 

Athena scowled. “I certainly am not your babysitter! And as for being an _audio-animatronic—_ “ she said the words pointedly, “I can’t help what I’m made of any more than you can." 

“You could have at least not lied to me about it,” Frank accused.  

“You never asked if I was an AA and I never told you that I wasn’t."

“But you knew!” Frank looked slightly chagrined at the volume of his outburst. “You knew I thought you were a girl. I’ve been trying to figure out for days why you wouldn’t tell me. So I asked Dr. Nix, and he told me not to take it so hard. That it wasn’t personal, just programming." 

“That is possibly the most idiotic, ignorant things he’s ever said,” stated Athena, “which is saying quite a lot. Did he tell you he programmed me most recently, for my recruitment duties?"

Frank shifted uncomfortably. “No, he didn’t."

“I didn’t think he would. He told me not to recruit you last year. He didn’t want you. I did. Just because I am bound and predisposed to certain protocols doesn’t mean that I can’t find infinite variation within them, and act on my own. I believed you had something beyond the search parameters I was given. Something special.” She paused. “I still do."

For a second, he looked her in the eyes, and she thought that maybe she had convinced him. Whether he thought her girl or audio-animatronic, she wanted to preserve that belief for him; he craved the opportunity to share his wonder in what he found or created, and without her, he was as alone as he had been with his father.

She didn’t know if she could be selfish, but she wanted him to share what brought him happiness with her, because she liked when he did, just for her own sake.

But then he dropped his gaze, and kicked a piece of concrete that had come loose from the pavement.  

“Yeah, well, I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me the truth. Or why you don’t even seem like you wanted to."

“A small percentage of your projected responses predicted you reacting negatively,” Athena said in a small voice. “Statistically, I should have told you, as you were most likely to react positively or neutrally. A negative response was expected to result in you not wanting to be around me, so I wanted to find a way to eliminate the possibility of a negative response before I told you." 

“You predicted right,” he said. “I don’t want to be around you.” 

Athena stepped back, her eyebrows going up. “Just because I’m an AA?"

“No,” he answered. “Because you’re a liar."

~~~~~

Casey watched Frank walk away, and fast-forwarded through the rest of the video for the day, and then for the videos in the file from 17 May 1965, then the 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st… Frank didn't appear in any of them. Casey was certain they must have made up at some point between then and 1984, but she couldn’t find it. And this wasn’t getting her any closer to figuring out what Frank would like for his birthday.  

But god, did she want to see that fight made right. She knew that at the end, Frank had known Athena was a person, even if she wasn’t a human. He’d known it when he was arguing with Athena when they were driving down the highway drying out from their dunking in the lake, because there’s no point in arguing like _that_  with someone you don’t think is any more than a talking microwave. You don’t blame your laptop for lying to you or hurting you. 

When Casey realized that two hours had passed as she searched for the next time Frank and Athena talked, and that she had to be getting home for dinner soon, she stopped looking. She went down the list a few years to the file marked 21 July 1969 before her phone buzzed. 

_Dinner’s almost ready, are you going to be here for it?_ her dad had texted. He’d gotten in the habit of asking where she planned to be after the whole thing where she got arrested and then lied about camping to run off to Texas and then New York and then an alternate dimension. Given that her doing all that resulted in him getting a job that was better than a limited contract with NASA, she felt that she should be allowed to do whatever she wanted without being questioned, but he didn’t see it quite that way. Her dad couldn’t quite make it all the way to being passive-aggressive about her unexplained absences, but he did occasionally threaten a curfew if she didn’t keep him up to date. 

_On my way_ , she texted back, shoving her stuff into her backpack and quickly locking her computer terminal. She was walking out of the building that housed the archives and heading for the tram when she collided with Frank. 

“Hey, watch—“ he started. “Casey! I was just coming to find you."

“I was heading home,” she said, checking to make sure nothing had fallen out of her bag when he walked into her. “What’s going on?"

“What happened to the documentation on the electrostatic membrane filter? Are we not writing down results anymore?"

Casey rolled her eyes. “Experiments would be faster if we quit, but no. I didn’t save the updated documentation on the main drive because we needed to order more materials before the adsorption rates would be valid to report, which I made a note of on our shared drive that you should have been able to see."

“Oh, and how am I supposed to know that?"

“The emails I sent you? I sent like three messages, and copied you on the order form. Do you ever read anything?"

Frank crossed his arms and scowled. He wasn’t a huge fan of being wrong, or of having it pointed out, or really anything that disturbed his peace and quiet. Casey just looked at him. Some people were intimidated when he yelled, but she was over that by the time she was flung off his front porch in New York. “Look, I’ve got a lot to deal with every day—"

“I can’t help it if you have no reading comprehension!"

“I can spend about thirty seconds reading anything and if it’s not clear enough to understand by then, I don’t have the time to figure it out so—"

“But yet you totally have time to come across town and yell at me about it?"

“If you wrote clearly, I wouldn’t have to!"

“I don’t know how much more clearly I can write than ‘results are invalid, I reordered materials, documentation is in shared drive’! I thought brilliant people were supposed to come here, not people who can’t read!” 

She’d done everything right and it was intolerable that he was being such an asshole. God, yes, she knew better than to write more than one sentence in a message to him because he wouldn’t read past the first line, but she had to explain the context, and anyway, the project had his name on it too so he was just as responsible for reading what she sent him as she was to write clearly. 

And she’d been in the lab until almost midnight when she wrote him those emails, so really, he needed to cut her some slack. 

Casey glared at Frank, and he glared back. “Look, all I’m asking for is that the experiments get done and recorded so that we can move this along, this isn’t even a huge project, it just needs to get done."

“And I’m doing that, Frank, I’m doing everything just like you told me to do it, so if it’s wrong, maybe you taught me wrong, have you considered that?” Frank huffed a sigh. “You just hate working with anyone, Frank! You’re so used to being alone you can’t stand anyone else being involved in any of your projects."

“I wouldn’t hate working with people if they would just understand what I want from them!” Frank bellowed, and a few passers-by turned to look. He glared at them, too, before turning his attention back to Casey. “Fine, I’ll look for those messages again, I’ll check the shared drive. But next time can you find a way to make it clear what you’re doing?"

“Yeah. Sure,” she said shortly, and didn’t add a _whatever_  to the end of that, because he was talking to her like she wasn’t a kid but a grown-up scientist doing real work, even if he generally talked to real adult scientists like they were shit. Many of them also talked to Frank like that, so it wasn’t just him being the lone asshole. “I’ll see you in the lab tomorrow, if you’re there. I’m heading home before my brother eats my dinner."

“See you,” Frank said curtly, and she pushed past him to catch a tram just before the doors closed. She dropped into a seat at the end of the car with her bag on her lap, and tried to push away her annoyance. All afternoon, she’d been working on a present for him, trying to do something nice for him, when she knew he didn’t want to celebrate his birthday. It was just that they’d been through so much together, and were rebuilding Tomorrowland from the self-congratulatory cesspool Governor Nix had turned it into, and it meant long days and hard projects, but they were doing it. But with coming up on the first year since the change in leadership, they were both snapping at each other. The first round of the recruitment program was up and running, but the results weren’t in yet to tell if bringing in new dreamers would be sustainable. 

It might not be the best time to irritate him more with a birthday he didn’t even want. 

That thought made her morose as she ate her dinner in silence, letting Nate’s chatter about his day at school wash over her. Afterwards, when her brother was loading the dishwasher, her dad moved over to sit next to her at the table. “What’s wrong, Casey? You were a little too quiet just now."

“Nothing,” she said. “Frank. I wanted to make him something for his birthday, but he doesn’t really want to pay attention to his birthday, and like, last year we almost died, I think birthdays are important under the circumstances! But he just wants to be dumb and alone and I’m probably wasting my time."

Her dad put his hand on hers. “After your mom passed, I didn’t want to celebrate Christmas, or my next birthday, or anything. Didn’t seem worth it when the one person I wanted to celebrate another year of life with wasn’t… wasn’t around anymore. I did make sure we all had birthdays and Christmas and all that, because you and your brother deserved it, and life moves on anyway, even if you don’t want it to.” He gave her half a smile, and kind of a sad one at that. “I don’t know Frank as well as you do, Case, but I can tell he’s lost a lot and he’s been alone and not moving on from that. I think it’s great you want to celebrate his birthday with him. You should respect what he wants, but you have to listen carefully to know what that is. What people say they want isn’t always what they really do want." 

Casey turned her hand over and squeezed his hand. “I miss Mom too.” She leaned over to kiss her dad on the forehead. “I’ve got to go. I’m going to keep trying."

“It’s a Friday night, don’t you want to stay in, relax, go to bed early?"

“No, Dad, that’s you. Because you’re old."

“You keep working at the pace you’ve been working, you’re going to be old sooner than you expect,” her dad muttered. He raised his voice as she headed out the front door. “Be safe and try to be home by midnight, okay?” 

“Okay!” she shouted back, heading for the stairs. When she got back to the archive, she unlocked her terminal and played the last video she’d selected. She would figure this out.

The video started playing, and it was no longer outside in the city, but rather in a workshop, much like the ones Casey worked in regularly now. There was a boy in his late teens, and it took Casey a second to recognize him as Frank; he was no longer the chubby-cheeked kid with the bowl cut, but thick dark almost-curly hair, heavy eyebrows, and a wide grin that made his eyes squint when he smiled. Beyond him, there was a window to the hallway, and Athena was reflected in the glass. She was no longer wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail, but rather loose and wavy, and though it was hard to tell with just the reflection, she looked somehow older. Makeup, Casey thought it might be. She didn’t look much older, just not as young as she had when Frank had met her, or when Casey had met her. Maybe it had something to do with Frank growing older.

~~~~~

The lab was chilly, but nothing Athena was bothered by; Frank wore a sweater. Athena was more bothered by her arm, and how the flesh had split, and the wires controlling the movements of her right hand were cut, and the metal surfaces of her ulna and radius were scraped. 

“Does it hurt?” Frank asked.

Athena considered. “I am finding it difficult to maintain other cognitive functions that don’t involve thinking about my arm, and I feel very negative about the fact that those pieces of me are exposed and that I can’t move my hand.” She paused. “And the sensation is traveling up the rest of my arm and I’d like very much for it to stop if you could do something about that quickly!” 

“So it does hurt,” Frank concluded. “I’m going to figure out which wire is conducting sensory signals and try to disconnect it while I work on this, so you’re in less pain.” He pulled a standing magnifier over and lightly separated the wires nearer to her elbow with the tip of a pair of needle nose pliers. A moment later, he pulled one end of a wire free. Athena leaned forward in relief, her overworked processors returning to normal speed. “Is that better?” Frank asked with concern.

“Much,” she assured him, and smiled. He grinned, with no small amount of relief, then moved the magnifier further down her arm. 

“I’m pretty sure I can solder all these wires back together, but the scrapes to your— well, bones, I guess, those are just surface and shouldn’t interfere with your arm function."

“I assessed as much. They’re unpleasant, but shouldn’t be any hindrance. I have a tube of liquid flesh for sealing skin, I usually have fixed those problems myself since the initial technicians trained me."

Frank turned away to get a soldering iron, but Athena could see his face twist in a brief scowl. He wasn’t fond of her original technicians, and had said as much before; he didn’t like that they treated her like a machine, even though she was one. He had learned as much as he could about her systems in order to provide her with most regular maintenance. She much preferred Frank working on her as well. 

“What I don’t understand is why you did it,” he said, turning back to her. “Why you caught that beam."

Athena frowned. “It would have crushed you. I’m stronger."

Frank lined up two wires and started melding the ends. “You could have pushed me out of the way. Or told me to run and hoped for the best. But you got under it and it could have crushed you, too, if we’d been any closer to the beam when it fell."

Athena was becoming impatient. “It just seemed like the best thing to do at the time. I just reacted."

“But that’s not your protocol,” Frank insisted. “Your programming isn’t like those bodyguards that some of the important people have, they’re meant to dive in front of a bullet. They’re shields, walking around in suits. You’re different, you’re a recruiter. You don’t have the programming for that."

“I can protect recruits in extraordinary circumstances. And some people come from dangerous areas, it’s necessary."

Frank looked up at her from her arm. “New recruits. I’ve been with you for five years and I’ve seen your recruits come into Tomorrowland and go on their way. I’m not one of them."

Athena shrugged with the shoulder of the arm not being worked on. “The parameters didn’t specify a time frame for recruit protection."

Frank laughed softly.

“What’s funny?” Athena asked. 

“You are,” he said. “‘It’s not personal, it’s programming’, huh?” he continued, quoting what Dr. Nix had said years before. 

“Of course.” It was her programming. That didn’t mean that it only gave her one option. “I don’t know why that matters."

He gave her that funny smile again, the one that had caused her to suspect her empathy interface was flawed, but not something she wanted to report to be fixed. She’d rather keep this bug, even without ever being quite sure why. 

“You’re the most creative person I know, Athena,” Frank said. 

That was categorically untrue. “You’ve met artists and architects here, all sorts of people. They have the ability to create. They have ideas. I’m not made to have ideas, just to find people who do.” 

“It’s a different kind of creative,” he told her. 

She sat for a while in silence, holding her arm perfectly still while he matched up the connections in her arm. “I don’t understand you,” she said finally.

“And I don’t understand you,” Frank answered. “So what?" 

And Athena had to admit that their mutual lack of understanding made for no functional difference at all, and with her now-working hand, she clasped his hand, just because he had made it so she could.

~~~~~ 

So that was what it had been like, Casey thought, as the video ended. When she had been in the middle of Frank and Athena arguing in the truck as she just tried to wring out her hat and shirt and hope they didn’t get pulled over for letting someone who looked twelve drive, she’d felt the crawling awkwardness of being stuck in the middle of a fight between parents. No matter what they looked like, they’d both been bickering like twelve year olds and comfortable like people who’d been married long enough to have grandchildren.  

The last video had reminded her more of her parents, before her mother died, when they would cook together in the kitchen. They moved together, like there was some sort of invisible line between them, as her mother chopped onions and her father scooped them up and kneaded them into the hamburger meat in one motion, and then she would spin around him to check how hot the grill was and take out the buns to warm. When her mom got sick, the kitchen had seemed so empty. Even when her dad cooked, for a long time, it almost was like he didn’t know his way around, and was always reaching for things that weren’t there. 

Casey thought back to what her dad had said about loneliness, and listening.

She thought back to what Frank had shouted at her in the street, that he wouldn’t hate working with people if they just understood what he wanted from them. He might as well have said the person he’d love to work with was someone who understood him. He and Athena might have perpetually failed to understand the little things about each other, but where it really mattered, they were the only ones who could understand at all.

She knew what Frank wanted, she just didn’t think that it was possible, and maybe it wasn’t. As far as she knew, it might take a year to put together, or it might not. She couldn’t know unless she tried. Casey had gone into Athena’s memories, since Athena understood better than anyone else in the world what Frank wanted. Athena was dead, but she had never been alive, not in the traditional sense, and maybe that meant she could be alive again. 

“Computer,” she said out loud, “how long do you estimate it would take for a full restore of AA unit Athena to a replacement AA interfaced unit?” 

“Calculating data transfer speed,” the computer responded. “Three days, six hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirteen seconds."

Frank’s birthday was in four days. If nothing went wrong, that was just enough time.

Casey checked the time. It was almost nine o’clock. She had just enough time to get to the AA storage facility. 

“I’m about to go home,” the technician on duty complained when she showed up, five minutes before closing. 

“It’s urgent!” she said. “I need an AA that can hold a lot of memory. Like an absolute crap-ton of data. I have to replace an old AA." 

“Any appearance requirements?” the technician asked, sighing and pulling up a list on her tablet. 

Casey hadn’t actually thought that far. None of the AAs were built to the same external specifications, since they were supposed to blend in with human populations when necessary. Even if there had been a mold, Athena was made so long ago that it was surely gone by now. And even so... 

“An adult woman,” Casey decided. Some things were just easier. 

“Okay, follow me,” the technician said, and she led Casey down an aisle she hadn’t been down before on the few occasions she’d seen where their child-sized recruiters had come from. This row was filled with female AA units of all body types, held upright by hooks under their arms, and staring blankly ahead. They didn’t look like anything that could ever live, but Casey had seen the units before and after their artificial intelligence was uploaded. Something changed; it was more than movement or functionality, but the awakening of self-awareness. They became people by realizing they had a self to be a person. 

Casey looked at the units. One was a young white woman with blonde hair; she’d be attractive, but that wasn’t the quality Casey was most looking for. Another was middle-aged, her body soft and lines showing on her face. Casey walked slowly down the line, and then one unit caught her eye. 

The unit wasn’t as young as the blonde woman, but younger than the middle-aged woman; Casey would guess mid-thirties, or perhaps closer to forty. Her skin was smooth, and darker than Casey’s, and her hair sprang out in curly spirals to her shoulders. But what really drew Casey was her eyes: they were light green, and looked like they were just missing a spark to become sharply observant. Athena’s eyes had been just like that. “This one,” Casey said. “She’s just right."

The technician checked off a box on her tablet. “Okay, sign here. The unit can be scheduled for the copying terminal on Tuesday morning, at the earliest."

“It has to be started _now_!” Casey said in some distress. “Sorry, Mariam,” she added when the technician jumped, after sneaking a quick look at her name badge for the first time. “Look, I’m Casey Newton, I’m partially in charge of the AA recruiter program, and this is kinda a priority. If we can get the process started tonight and let it run this weekend, I’ll make sure that nobody gets their panties in a knot over any delays, and… like, if there’s something else you want, I’m sure I can make it happen."

Mariam raised an eyebrow. “Well…” 

In the end, the AA unit was connected to central data storage for a full restore of Athena, and Casey had arranged two weeks’ extra vacation for Mariam, and a firm promise that she would do her best to get her and her wife tickets on an upcoming passenger space flight. A few favors would have to be called in for that one. It was worth it.  

By Tuesday morning when Casey arrived at the lab where the AA-programming terminal was, the unit was no longer there. She looked around, and saw Mariam wrestling another unit across off a hand truck and across to the terminal. “Oh, let me help with that,” she said, rushing over. They got the unit into place, and then Mariam led Casey into a side room, where the unit that was Athena’s new body sat stiffly, eyes closed. “She hasn’t been woken up yet for function checks, but the file transfer went fine. Part of the programming process is to adapt any information to work within the physical needs of the body, so even with a different body, she should still have the ability to walk and talk and all normal functions.” Mariam paused. “Since this was a restore, I figured you might know her, and you’d be better able to check how well she works." 

“Yeah,” answered Casey, distracted. Mariam pressed a section of the AA’s neck and held it down for a few seconds, then stepped back. A few moments passed. Then the unit blinked, one eye at a time, and looked up, turning her green eyes on Casey. 

Her forehead wrinkled. “Casey, what are you doing up here?” Then she looked like she was remembering something. “Eleven months have passed. Is Frank alright?” She still sounded like Athena, Casey noted; her voice was a little deeper, a little more grown up, but she still had that clipped, matter-of-fact tone and a mixture of American and English accents. 

“He’s fine,” Casey assured her. “It worked. You ended the broadcasts."

Athena rolled her neck experimentally. “But that means I—“ She cut herself off, and held up her hand. It was a very different hand. “Oh."

“I took your last backup and did a full restore of you, but… did it work? Are you… all you?"

“It will take some time to scan each file, but I don’t immediately note any obvious gaps.” She stood up, walked from one end of the room to the other and back, then lifted her arms in front of her and above her head. “No apparent physical impairments."

“Good,” said Casey. “Good."

Athena looked down at her, a little familiar smile forming on her lips. “Did you think you’d broken me again?" 

Casey didn’t even mean to; she just found herself getting up and wrapping Athena in a tight hug. This time, Athena was her own height. “Yeah, I thought we kinda did,” she whispered. “I missed you.” 

~~~~~

The next day, Casey pulled Frank away from working on a civil engineering modeling project and said, “I made a birthday present for you and it was going to be a surprise but honestly you’re getting older and I was worried you might have a heart attack."

“And she wonders why I didn’t want to have anyone celebrating my birthday,” Frank said to the empty room. “I should have expected that telling you to ignore my birthday would go completely unheard."

“Yes, you should have,” Casey agreed. “I was trying to figure out what you would want most, so I looked at Athena’s memory files of you—"

“Who said you could do that?” demanded Frank. “Wait. That’s not possible, Athena’s memory files don’t exist, I checked—“ And then he cut himself off, looking angry that he’d said anything. Casey knew what kind of topics he’d shut himself up over, and decided to not open up that very large can of worms.

“Maybe you just didn’t have access,” Casey said. “A girl’s gotta have her secrets."

“When you don’t have access, it just denies you what’s already there,” Frank told her, and she carefully didn’t say that she had already found that out. “No, I bet this was a thing Nix did. The man had this habit. He’d decide what was alright for you to know, and what wasn’t.” A grimace of distaste twisted Frank’s face for a moment. 

“Weird, during those few hours I knew him, he seemed like such a free-knowledge-for-all kind of guy."

Frank shot her a look. “You’re gonna be a smartass to me today? On my birthday?"

“Thought you didn’t want me to recognize your birthday."

“Kid, so help me, I will pitch you out the window without a jetpack—“ He regained control of himself. “Anyway. Nix would lock you out of certain search terms altogether when he thought you were better off not knowing. Better off by his standards, in any case. He did it when my dad got sick, I never found out until later that there even was a file on him, let alone how to access it. Think he knew that if I knew it was in there…” 

Casey thought about her dad. She knew Frank’s relationship with his father had not been nearly so close, but if Nix had done that to her… “Yeah. You would have done whatever it took to get in. And if you knew the entire backup of Athena was in the archives, you’d want to…"

Frank looked at her. He looked too old, and too young and lost, all at the same time. He’d grown up with Athena for twenty years, but she’d never grown up with him. “Oh,” said Casey in a small voice. “Right."

“So what’s this big not-a-surprise that you have for me?” Frank asked gruffly. 

“One second,” Casey said, and got up to open the door. She peered down the hallway, and then waved Athena over. Frank looked up when she stepped through the door. 

“Hello, Frank,” she said. 

Frank looked at her, then to Casey. “Who’s this?” he asked. 

Athena smiled. “I’m the future, Frank Walker."

 

**Author's Note:**

> Merry Yuletide, WickedWonder! I had a delightful time writing this- Casey has a wonderful perspective on the world, and writing Frank and Athena together is such a joy, because I can't stop being happy that the two of them just, you know, have each other and are adorable and troublemakers and are always the magnet to each other's compass. GOD I LOVE THEM. So thank you for requesting them so that I could spend so much time with them. <3


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